“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (post 3): Narrator’s probable multiple personality-type memory gap and Camilla’s French-speaking alternate personality.

I am halfway through the novel, and the murder announced in the Prologue has taken place: five college seminar students have killed the sixth, because the latter knew that four of them had killed a bystander when they had been in a state of ritual, dissociative-type “madness” (which they had intentionally worked themselves into for the express purpose of getting away from their regular selves).

Since the student I previously noted as having childish handwriting (child-aged alternate personality?) was the one they killed, the question of his having multiple personality remains unanswered. However, two of the other students have now had episodes suggestive of multiple personality.

Camilla

Following the ritual madness murder of the bystander, “Camilla couldn’t even talk for three days…She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn’t come out right. As if she had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high school French came back before her English…" (1, p. 168). The most likely explanation is that she had a French-speaking alternate personality who spoke before her regular English-speaking personality came back.

Richard

The first-person narrator has a memory gap, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: “Then I remember feeling dizzy, pushing through the crowd [at a party] to get some air. I could see the door propped invitingly with a cinder block, could feel a cold draft on my face. Then—I don’t know, I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew my back was against a wall, in an entirely different place, and a strange girl was talking to me. Gradually I understood that I must have been standing there with her for some time…” (1, p. 268-269).

Before coming to the party, another student had given Richard a Demerol. And then at the party, he had been drinking. But prior to his taking the Demerol and drinking, he had already been “in a sort of trance” (1, p. 266). And, coincidentally, the girl he finds himself talking to at the party is described as “a small girl, barely five feet” (1, p. 269), which happens to be the stature of the author, who in her magazine article about her childhood (post 2) had described herself as involved with what amounted to self-hypnosis (often posited as the mechanism of multiple personality).

But the main point—discussed in previous posts about the confusion between alcohol blackouts and multiple personality memory gaps—is that the latter is often mistaken for the former.

Richard accompanies the small, college girl back to her apartment, where they have sexual relations. Then Richard goes back to his own apartment, where he is visited by one of the male students in his seminar, who is homosexual, and who kisses Richard. Richard starts to respond to the kisses, but they are interrupted. It is implied that his response is another aftereffect of the Demerol, but it may be that Richard has a homosexual alternate personality.

In short, Camilla’s French-speaking personality and Richard’s memory gap are this novel’s first concrete indications of multiple personality; that is, they are first if you don’t count the novel’s pivotal event, the ritual dissociative “madness.”

1. Donna Tartt. The Secret History. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Donna Tartt (post 2): Novelist Describes Her “Southern Gothic Childhood” of Tonsils, Codeine, Sleepwalking, Imaginary Playmates, and Fun with Self-Hypnosis.

In the same year that Donna Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History, she published a magazine article about her own childhood (1).

“I started to become what they called ‘sickly’ when I was about five years old. The problem was bad tonsils, nothing serious. But until they were removed, when I was seven, I was ill and feverish much of the time and had to stay in bed an average of about three days a week…

“What my great-grandfather did prescribe for me—along with whatever medicine I got from the doctor…[was] glasses of whiskey at my bedtime and regular massive doses of…codeine cough syrup. The whiskey was mixed with sugar and hot water; it was supposed to make me sleep and help me put on weight, both of which it did…and—between the fever and the whiskey and the codeine—I spent nearly two years of my childhood submerged in a pretty powerfully altered state of consciousness…

“My report card for the first grade stated that I was ‘quiet’ and ‘cooperative.’ But what I really preferred was staying home sick, where I could allow my hallucinations to run free without the teacher’s tedious interruptions. I would stare, sometimes for hours, at a particular View-Master reel: Peter Pan, soaring high over London…Even when unmedicated, if I stared at this particular picture long enough, I sometimes got the giddy sensation that I was flying; just as, if I closed my eyes in the backseat of my mother’s Chrysler and tried hard enough, I could sometimes transform the Chrysler into an airplane…

“My mother…too, had been a dreamy little girl who sleepwalked and had imaginary playmates.

“We also shared the gift…of being able to plunge ourselves into sort of eerie, self-induced fits. I would stare fixedly at a certain object [a classic method to induce hypnosis] and repeat a word or phrase until it became nonsense. Then, at some subsequent point…I would have absolutely no idea who or where I was, and be unable to recognize even members of my own family…I stumbled upon this gift quite by accident when I was four or five, while sitting in an Italian restaurant in Memphis with my parents…the last time I was ever able to successfully pull this trick was when I was a sophomore in high school…” (1).

Writing and Self-Hypnosis

Some of Tartt’s hallucinations and altered states of consciousness may have been due to fever and drugs. But everything that she voluntarily induced by intense staring was probably an adventure in self-hypnosis. And since she does not call it self-hypnosis, she may not have realized that that was the talent she was developing and practicing during her childhood.

As discussed in past posts, some writers have explicitly said that the process of writing fiction includes self-hypnosis. And of course, after they have practiced that talent, they may become able to enter the hypnotic trance more or less at will, without having to use any induction techniques such as staring. All they need to do to enter the trance is whatever little ritual they have developed to get into their writing frame of mind.

Dissociative, Altered States of Consciousness

Multiple personality is a condition of dissociative, altered states of consciousness. Tartt mentions having sleepwalking, imaginary playmates, altered states of consciousness, and self-induced states of mind in which she did not recognize her family members, all of which could very well have been symptoms of multiple personality, but since she does not elaborate sufficiently on what these experiences entailed, the history is not definitive.

Her enjoyable, self-induced states, one aspect of which was that she temporarily did not recognize family members, are interesting, because people with multiple personality may have certain alternate personalities who do not know people with whom the regular personality is quite familiar. Indeed, when evaluating a person suspected of having multiple personality, it is sometimes useful to ask family members if the person sometimes does not seem to know them. However, Tartt does not give sufficient details for me to be sure about the nature of these episodes.

All I can say is that Tartt’s childhood involved two traumatic years (ages five to seven) involving dissociative, altered states of consciousness, and other years which included episodes of dissociative, altered states of consciousness, some intentionally self-induced and some not.

1. Donna Tartt. “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine.” Harper’s Magazine, July 1992, pp. 60-66. http://www.languageisavirus.com/donna_tartt/non-fiction-sleepytown.php#.WXwn2lqGM4V

“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (Prologue and Chapter One): Narrator brags he is a liar and says he joined other students who committed murder.

The Prologue announces that the story will be how Bunny, one of the college students in a small seminar, comes to be murdered by the other students in the seminar, including the narrator.

But since the second word of the prologue’s first sentence is “snow,” and since each of the next two paragraphs begins with “It is difficult to believe,” the prologue would seem to be a warning to the reader that the story will involve some kind of lie or snow job.

Indeed, the first chapter begins with the first-person narrator Richard Papen’s acknowledgement that his “fatal flaw” is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” That is, he is a liar. As Richard later says, “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s lying on my feet. It’s sort of a gift I have” (1, p. 25).

Richard is one of six students in a college seminar on the ancient classics. The professor is Julian Morrow, who, it seems to me, runs the class like an evil cult. The seminar’s first principle is to lose one’s “self” with the kind of ancient ritual “madness” (1, p. 34) wherein “the personality was replaced” (1, p. 38). The seminar has a violence-promoting slogan, repeated four times in chapter one: “beauty is terror” (1, pp. 37, 40).

Near the end of chapter one, Richard gets a note from one of the other seminar students, Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, inviting Richard to lunch on Saturday. The note’s stationery and the place planned for the lunch are formal and adult. But “the handwriting [on the envelope] was crabbed and childish as a fifth grader’s, in pencil. The note within was in pencil, too, tiny and uneven and hard to read” (1, p. 41).

The childish handwriting may not mean that Bunny has a child-aged alternate personality, but the description of odd handwriting seems like something that would not have been included unless there were some reason. Of course, it could be a red herring.

1. Donna Tartt. The Secret History. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 15): Author interview fails to address either why Scarlett is changeable or the Lincoln assassination.

Margaret Mitchell was interviewed on an Atlanta radio station in 1936, the year Gone With the Wind was published. The interviewer, having read the novel, feels that its main theme is how people respond differently under stress: Melanie’s personality remains the same, but Scarlett’s personality changes. It is noteworthy that Margaret Mitchell’s answer is not at all responsive to the issue that the interviewer raises. Quoting from the interview:

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, I have read your book Gone With the Wind with a great deal of pleasure, but I know that many of our listeners are not familiar with it. So can you tell us, briefly, just what the book is about?

MISS MITCHELL: I am glad to tell you, Medora. My novel is the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction…It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time…

MRS. PERKERSON: Your heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, is not at all like the usual Civil War heroine. She was just as shocking in her era as the flapper was in the jazz age. Was it your idea that Scarlett was the product of her time, just as the flapper was the product of the period following the World War?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, wars have a way of changing women…The sorrow and hardships and poverty of the Civil War changed Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled and selfish but otherwise normal Southern girl into a hardened adventuress, just as the wild period following the World War made modern girls cut loose from their mothers’ apron strings and do shocking things.

MRS. PERKERSON: …Melanie and Scarlett went through the war and Reconstruction, side by side, and it was fascinating to see how the same set of circumstances produced such contrasts in character. The experiences that hardened Scarlett O’Hara and made her unscrupulous simply made Melanie Wilkes more of a lady…that seemed to me to be the real theme of the book, how different characters reacted under the stress of circumstances.

MISS MITCHELL: If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose the theme is survival…

Margaret Mitchell goes on to speak of survival in general, totally ignoring the interviewer’s question about why different survivors react differently; why some, like Melanie, become more of what they were before, while others, like Scarlett, undergo radical change. It would appear that Mitchell’s host personality did not relate to that issue.

Lincoln Assassination

In a previous post, I raised the issue of why the novel never mentions the assassination of President Lincoln, which would have been discussed by people living in Atlanta at that time. This interview makes much of how the author steeped herself in research of historical details, but neither the interviewer nor the author mentions the assassination.

Earlier this month, I went to Ask NYPL, a service of The New York Public Library. But their research department could not find anything published in which Margaret Mitchell addresses why her novel does not mention the assassination.

It is puzzling to me that Mitchell never mentions it and nobody ever asks her about it.

1. Interview with Margaret Mitchell from 1936. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/margaret-mitchell-american-rebel-interview-with-margaret-mitchell-from-1936/2011/

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 14):  “I won’t think of it now” is Scarlett’s self-hypnotic suggestion to switch to alternate personality.

The novel’s famous ending:

“I won’t think of it now,” she thought grimly, summoning up her old charm…“I won’t think of it now,” she said again, aloud, trying to push her misery to the back of her mind…“I’ll think of it tomorrow…Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day” (1, pp. 1036-1037).

Those lines are actually an old refrain. Scarlett has recited virtually the same words previously. But why does Scarlett think of “I won’t think of it now” as “her old charm”? In what sense does she use the word “charm”?

“Her old charm” means her old, tried and true, magical incantation. What magical effect has she come to expect from thinking or saying aloud, “I won’t think of it now”?

When Scarlett finds herself facing a problem she can’t solve, she uses that phrase as a kind of self-hypnotic suggestion to prompt a switch to an alternate personality. She is suggesting to the personality that is currently out and in control (and who is miserable because it can’t solve the current problem) that it temporarily give up control, go inside (“to the back of her mind”), and let another personality come out that is better able to deal with the problem.

With another personality in control, tomorrow will be another day.

1. Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind. New York, Scribner, 1936.

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 13): Scarlett experiences personified presence, is controlled by an unseen other, and has multiple personalities.

Conscience-stricken plus Personified Presence

“…added to [Scarlett’s] stunned sense of loss at Frank’s death [her second husband], were fear and remorse and the torment of a suddenly awakened conscience. For the first time in her life she was regretting things she had done, regretting them with a sweeping superstitious fear…God would punish her…Oh, if only God did not seem so furious and vengeful!” (1, pp. 821-822).

Scarlett’s previously described personalities (Southern belle, Atlanta businesswoman, etc.) were neither conscience-stricken nor prone to spiritual experiences, so the above would seem to be a different personality.

Scarlett speaks of a personified presence with whom she interacted, a person-like being who seemed “furious and vengeful” about how she had behaved. The religious interpretation is God. The literary interpretation is metaphor. A psychological interpretation would be that it was a furious and vengeful, alternate personality.

Conscience-free, Godless

“…I did try so hard to be nice to people and kind to Frank, but then the nightmare would come back and scare me so bad I’d want to rush out and just grab money away from people, whether it was mine or not…I’d go to bed and dream that I was back at Tara right after Mother died, right after the Yankees went through…I’m hungry and starving…My mind keeps saying: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’ll never, never be hungry again’…” (1, p. 828).

A possible interpretation is that her ruthless, masculine, businesswoman personality uses this nightmare to get control and take over.

Ashley-loving

“Ashley [who was married to Melanie, but had confessed to Scarlett that he loved her] was so honorable, so truthful, so kind…How could she live if that secret source of her strength, his love, were taken away from her?” (1, p. 823).

Rhett-like

“Perhaps…they were…alike. Sometimes [Scarlett] thought that all the people she had ever known were strangers except Rhett…” (1, p. 826).

Controlled by Unseen Other

She whispered ‘Yes’ before she even thought…a sudden calm fell on her spirit…She had promised to marry [Rhett] when she had no intention of promising…almost as if by divine intervention, a hand stronger than hers was about her affairs, settling her problems for her” (1, pp. 835-836).

Comment

Scarlett switches among various, distinctly different modes of thinking and behavior, and is also described as experiencing the presence of personified beings and forces within her, all of which is seen in multiple personality.

But the author has not labelled it as multiple personality. It is unacknowledged. And as previously discussed in regard to other writers, unacknowledged multiple personality probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

1. Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind. New York, Scribner, 1936.

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 12): Scarlett’s masculine alternate personality reflects the author’s masculine alternate personality, “Jimmy”

In a previous post, I quoted another character as telling Scarlett that her recent switch to a masculine businesswoman personality was really nothing new, since Scarlett had had that kind of personality in childhood, too.

Scarlett’s masculine alternate personality probably reflects Margaret Mitchell’s masculine alternate personality, which originated in Margaret Mitchell’s childhood:

“In an accident that was traumatic for her mother although she was unharmed [physically], when little Margaret was about three years old, her dress caught fire on an iron grate. Fearing it would happen again, her mother began dressing her in boys' pants, and she was nicknamed "Jimmy," the name of a character in the comic strip, Little Jimmy. Her brother insisted she would have to be a boy named Jimmy to play with him. Having no sisters to play with, Margaret said she was a boy named Jimmy until she was fourteen” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Margaret Mitchell.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mitchell

Prolific writers highlight that writers’ minds are different from yours, but book reviewers and literary criticism do not acknowledge the mental difference.

Many people imagine that they could write one novel. But when they see that some writers have published a dozen novels, they are not sure that they could write that many. And when they see that some novelists have published twenty, fifty, or, in some cases, literally hundreds of novels, they begin to suspect that their own mind and the minds of these prolific writers are different.

And since there is a prejudice against people who are different, book reviewers and literary criticism tend to disparage writers who are prolific.

Stephen King, who is considered prolific—although there are writers who are much more prolific than he is (1, 2, 3)—published an essay in The New York Times defending prolific writers. He mentions, in passing, a little of how his own mind works:

“As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane” (4).

King, who, as he says, hears voices—which elsewhere he describes as his muse, narrators, and characters; and which I discuss in past posts in terms of alternate personalities—is neither psychotic nor essentially different from other prolific novelists.

But are prolific writers different from writers who are not prolific? So far, in my study of over one hundred writers, I have found that nearly all novelists, prolific and nonprolific alike, have a normal version of multiple personality.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_writers

2. http://thewhynot100.blogspot.com/2014/06/17-most-prolific-writers-in-history.html

3. http://www.book-editing.com/editing-articles/hiley-prolific-novelists.html

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 11): Scarlett, the only major character who changes, does so among three alternate personalities.

Continuing to read this long novel, I am increasingly impressed by the fact that each of the main characters—except Scarlett—is portrayed as having one, and only one, personality. No matter how circumstances change, Ashley is Ashley, and everyone else, except Scarlett, remains basically unchanged.

Scarlett changes, but not for the reason you might think. In the first scene, she is a Southern belle, for whom work is a man’s responsibility, while later she is an Atlanta businesswoman, and you might think that this change is the result of maturation and that Gone With the Wind is a Bildungsroman.

But her hard-hearted, masculine personality, which serves her so well as an Atlanta businesswoman, is not the result of maturation, but has been one of her personalities since childhood. As Grandma says to Scarlett after her father’s funeral, “You were always hard as a hickory nut, even as a child, and I don’t like hard females, barring myself…You take your fences cleanly like a good hunter” (1, p. 715) and have “a man’s way of being smart” (1, p. 719).

However, Scarlett’s continued chaste love for Ashley, an ideal kind of man for a Southern belle, is a continual reminder that her Southern belle personality continues to exist.

A third personality is suggested by Scarlett’s reaction to Rhett: “For all his exasperating qualities, she grew to look forward to his calls. There was something exciting about him that she could not analyze,” evidently having to do with “his complete masculinity.”

“ ‘It’s almost like I was in love with him!’ she thought, bewildered, ‘But I’m not and I just can’t understand it’ ” (1, p. 221). Her sexual personality, possibly also present since childhood, is waiting its turn to come out. Indeed, the surprising fact that she gets pregnant with each of her first two husbands, even though she claims she doesn't want children, and she knows how to put them off, may indicate that her sexual personality has already come out when it had the chance.

In short, Scarlett is the only major character who changes, but her changes are among longstanding, ongoing, alternate personalities.

1. Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind. New York, Scribner, 1936.

New York Times on “The Incest Diary” by Anonymous: Criticism of reviews in which characters have a “descent into madness” and memoirs “dive into the abyss”

Since my previous post (on another book) had touched on what editors and publishers will accept and vouch for, today’s New York Times book review of The Incest Diary caught my attention.

I cannot be sure whether the reviewer, Dwight Garner, meant to reassure readers that the book is credible, or meant to ridicule the publisher’s way of vouching for the book’s credibility. His review includes the following:

“The author is apparently (there are a few clues) a published writer. Anonymity combined with extreme events: never a happy combination. About this book’s veracity, its publisher’s editor at large, Lorin Stein, who also edits The Paris Review, told the book’s potential foreign publishers in a statement: ‘I have no doubt about her honesty or clarity of mind. We interviewed old friends to whom the author confided the fact of her abuse years ago’ ” (1).

Note the precise words of the publisher’s prepared statement: “We interviewed old friends to whom the author confided the fact of her abuse years ago”: the fact, not the facts. Thus, at most, the old friends corroborated the fact that her father had abused her in some way. But they had little or nothing to say about the facts of her abuse, all the specific acts described in the book. Thus, the book may be anywhere from one percent to a hundred percent historically true.

The review says Anonymous eventually confronts her father about the years of abuse, and describes his response and the response of her family members, but I am guessing that if there had been a full confession and corroboration for all the specific acts of abuse previously described, then the publisher would have cited that corroboration in its prepared statement.

And apart from the issue of vague corroboration, why would the publisher have no doubt about the author’s “clarity of mind”? If you assumed that all the “horror scenes,” beginning at age three, were true, wouldn’t you infer that there might be serious psychological effects? Yet the review makes no mention of whether the author ever needed or had therapy.

Since, as the reviewer says, “Incest has been a steady presence in post-Homeric literature…Incest is a fact in many lives,” shouldn’t reviewers familiarize themselves with its potential psychological effects, and include that perspective in their reviews?

I am not attacking the credibility of this memoir (which is probably true to some unknown degree), but the credibility of other reviews in which characters are said to have a “descent into madness” and of this review in which the author is said to “dive into the abyss,” phrases which are psychologically meaningless.

The reviewer probably assumes that the only reasons for the author’s anonymity are embarrassment and legal, but if the person was abused since age three, the author may be an alternate personality.

1. Dwight Garner. “A Dive Into the Abyss in the Anonymous ‘Incest Diary’.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/books/review-anonymous-incest-diary.html?_r=0

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 10): Why is President Lincoln’s assassination, which would have affected the characters, not mentioned?

The two biggest historical news events during the time that this story takes place were the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. So why is the assassination never mentioned? I have not yet finished rereading the novel (I first read it many years ago), but as Wikipedia says:

“Although Abraham Lincoln is mentioned in the novel fourteen times, no reference is made to his assassination on April 14, 1865” (1).

Wikipedia, which likes to give references for all its facts, gives no reference for the above statement, suggesting it is a fact known to alert readers, but that there may not be any published discussion about it.

Unable myself to find anything published about it, I have requested the help of a librarian to research whether Margaret Mitchell ever discussed the issue. Results are pending.

Meanwhile, I can readily think of a reason for the author to omit the assassination. She was sympathetic to the South, and might not have wanted to mention anything that could in any way have justified the harshness of the Reconstruction Era.

But would not the author, editor, and publisher have expected the omission of the assassination to cause an uproar? Would it not have made more sense to mention it, but put some mitigating spin on it?

Surprisingly, the omission did not, as far as I know, cause an uproar. Indeed, when I read this novel and saw the movie years ago, I never noticed the omission.

It is truly amazing what readers and reviewers fail to perceive in a novel—omitted assassinations, unlabelled multiple personality, whatever—if the narrator and characters do not call attention to it.

1. Wikipedia. “Gone With the Wind (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(novel)

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 9): Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, Ashley, Gerald, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and multiple personality.

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (1). I propose to use this famous saying to contrast people with multiple personality (foxes) and people with one personality (hedgehogs).

Scarlett is the only “fox” in Gone With the Wind. Her personalities switch and alternate according to circumstances. Scarlett observes:

“…they are who they are, O’Haras, Wilkeses, Hamiltons. Even the darkies feel that way. Oh, they’re all fools!…They’ll go right on thinking and living as they always have, and nothing will change them. Melly can dress in rags and pick cotton and even help me murder a man but it doesn’t change her. She’s still the shy well-bred Mrs. Wilkes, the perfect lady! And Ashley can see death and war and be wounded and lie in jail and come home to less than nothing and still be the same gentleman he was when he had all Twelve Oaks behind him…They won’t change. Maybe they can’t change. I’m the only one who’s changed—and I wouldn’t have changed if I could help it” (2, p. 549).

Hedgehogs, people with only one personality, may do either very well or very poorly, depending on how their single personality works under the circumstances. The least successful hedgehog is Gerald, Scarlett’s father. The changed circumstances leave him stunned and immobilized. The most successful hedgehog is Rhett. His single personality, the cynical profiteer, leaves him a wealthy winner. Occasionally, giving in to social pressure, he tries to be what he is not, as when he joins the South’s lost cause, but it doesn’t work for him, so he reverts to his one true self.

Two of Scarlett’s personalities—the histrionic Southern belle and the ruthless Tara-protector—alternate successfully, depending on the circumstances.

1. Isaiah Berlin. “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox

2. Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind. New York, Scribner, 1936.

Stendhal used over 100 pseudonyms, more than Fernando Pessoa, the writer most suspected of multiple personality because of many pseudonyms.

A few years ago, when I told a literature professor of my theory that most novelists had multiple personality, the only writer the professor thought might have had multiple personality was Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher who had used eighty-one pseudonyms (which he called “heteronyms”) (1).

So today I was surprised to learn that French writer Stendhal (a pseudonym) had previously published under many other names, and had continued to use more than a hundred pseudonyms in his autobiographical writings and correspondence. To quote Wikipedia:

“Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer, best known for his novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). He is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism.

“Before settling on the pen name Stendhal, he published under many pen names, including ‘Louis Alexandre Bombet’ and ‘Anastasius Serpière.’ The only book that Stendhal published under his own name was The History of Painting (1817). From the publication of Rome, Naples, Florence (1817) onwards, he published his works under the pseudonym ‘M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie.’ He borrowed this nom de plume from the German city of Stendhal, birthplace of Johann Joachim Winckelman, an art historian and archaeologist famous at the time.

“Stendhal used many aliases in his autobiographical writings and correspondence, and often assigned pseudonyms to friends, some of whom adopted the names for themselves. Stendhal used more than a hundred pseudonyms, which were astonishingly diverse. Some he used no more than once, while others he returned to throughout his life. ‘Dominique’ and ‘Salviati’ served as intimate pet names. He coins comic names ‘that make him even more bourgeois than he really is: Cotonnet, Bombet, Chamier.’ He uses many ridiculous names: ‘Don phlegm,’ ‘Giorgio Vasan,’ ‘William Crocodile,’ ‘Poverino,’ ‘Baron de Cutendre.’ One of his correspondents, Prosper Mérimée, said: ‘He never wrote a letter without signing a false name.’

“Stendhal's Journal and autobiographical writings include many comments on masks and the pleasures of ‘feeling alive in many versions.’ ‘Look upon life as a masked ball,’ is the advice that Stendhal gives himself in his diary for 1814. In Memoirs of an Egotist he writes: ‘Will I be believed if I say I'd wear a mask with pleasure and be delighted to change my name?...for me the supreme happiness would be to change into a lanky, blonde German and to walk about like that in Paris’ ” (2).

I may read Stendhal later this year.

1. Wikipedia. “Fernando Pessoa.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

2. Wikipedia. “Stendhal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal

Jane Austen’s Literary Legacy: Characters whose multiple personality makes it possible to both know and not know whom they have loved all along.

Back in 2007, writing in a publication of the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor Bruce Stovel pointed out that Emma Woodhouse is “a split character, with two very different sides,” and that the same thing is true of Austen characters in several of her novels (http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm).

Taking some of the professor’s observations as my starting point, I discussed Jane Austen’s Emma, and the psychological significance of both knowing and not knowing something, in the following two posts:

June 24, 2015

Jane Austen’s Emma: She had loved Mr. Knightley all along, but did not know it, because her love was conscious only to her alternate personality

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion” (1).

Emma’s two selves are acknowledged in this dialogue, in which Mr. Knightley says to Emma:

“I shall not scold you. I leave you to your own reflections.”

“Can you trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?”

“Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it.”

However, Emma, Knightley, and Professor Stovel never explicitly say whether they think that Emma has an ambivalent mixture of vanity and seriousness or a dissociation between a vain personality and a serious personality. In a mixture, there would be no issue of one part’s being unaware of what the other part thinks or feels. In a mixture, she would always have been aware that she loved Knightley, but would have been ambivalent about it. In contrast, in dissociation, one self may really not know what the other self thinks and feels. Multiple personality is also known as dissociative identity, because it entails such dissociation.

This romantic comedy scenario of lovers’ not realizing they are in love is interpreted differently depending on whether the reader has multiple personality. A reader who does not have it will think the scenario is a joke: how can people not know they are in love? A reader who does have multiple personality will consider the scenario to be ordinary psychology: of course things go on inside of which a person is not aware.

Emma’s love for Knightley had not been “unconscious,” except from the perspective of the host personality who was not co-conscious with the personality who loved him. The personality who had always loved him always knew it. That is why, once circumstances changed the balance of power among the personalities, allowing the personality who loved Knightley to come out and predominate, the change to loving him was quick. Emma was not finally learning to love him: behind the scenes, one of her personalities always had.

Writers write such multiple personality characters, because most writers are that way themselves. When writers comment that they will know what they think and feel when they see what they write, they are referring to the way that the thinking and feelings of their own alternate personalities come out from behind the scenes through their writing.

1. Bruce Stovel. “The New Emma in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line: V. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2007). http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm

June 28, 2015

Jane Austen’s Emma (post 2): Can a person love someone and not know it? How do I know it is possible and is related to multiple personality?

Can you both know something and not know it? It seems logically impossible. Although everyone has a little experience with that when they can’t remember a particular fact, but it comes back to them later, most people don’t have trouble accessing the fact that they love someone.

I learned that both knowing and not knowing is possible when I once asked a patient my usual screening question for multiple personality disorder—“Do you ever have memory gaps?”—and she answered, “No.” So I figured that she probably did not have it and moved on.

However, about six months later, in the course of my getting an update from her on her everyday life, I noted a discrepancy between something she mentioned and what she had told me previously. I was treating her in the psychiatric clinic of a hospital, and I assumed that she was getting all of her general medical care at the medical clinic of that same hospital (which was the hospital closest to where she lived), but now she made reference to attending the medical clinic at another hospital, and this took me by surprise. I asked for some verification, and she said that she kept the papers related to that treatment in a particular dresser drawer at home.

When I made an issue of her attending the other clinic as something she had never told me before, she became flustered [she was switching back to her regular personality], and then [her regular personality] said she knew nothing about going to a medical clinic at another hospital. But I told her to look in a particular dresser drawer when she got home and tell me next time what she found.

At the next appointment, she said that she had been surprised to find papers from another hospital in the drawer I had told her to look. And then I asked her the same question I had asked her six months before, “Do you ever have memory gaps?” But now she said that she did, and that she had been having them since childhood. “Well, why didn’t you tell me that when I asked you six months ago?” And I’ll never forget her answer:

“I knew, but I didn’t know.” She knew it sounded ridiculous, but that was her truth.

Amateur vs. Professional Liars: President Trump is amateur. Novelists are professionals. There is that difference, but what might they share psychologically?

President Trump, who, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post, is a notorious liar (1, 2), does not admit lying, and is condemned for doing it.

Novelists make a joke of being professional liars. Of course, since they label their lies “fiction,” their lies are not, technically, lies. And novelists are not only not condemned for their fictions, but are paid and awarded prizes.

It appears that both Trump and novelists, at least at the time they tell them, believe in many of their lies and fictions.

At the time Trump tells most of his lies, he apparently, in some sense, believes in their reality. After all, they are usually checkable, and he knows a president’s facts will be checked. 

Similarly, at the time novelists write their fictions, they often feel, in Toni Morrison’s phrase, that their fictions are “more real than real.”

Both Trump’s lies and novelists’ fictions are “alternative facts” (3)—the alternative facts of alternate realities—the alternate realities of alternate personalities.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.aee84a3dcd2d

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

Allegra Goodman, in New York Times Book Review, says she looks and listens with her character’s eyes and ears, and that writing “madness” is easy.

“If a character stumbles upon Ezra Pound, as Aidan does in my new novel, The Chalk Artist, I notice what he notices, and I hear what he hears” (1).

Goodman does not say that she imagines what the character would notice or hear. No, she appears to be saying that she looks and listens with the character’s eyes and ears.

So if I had been conducting the interview, I would have then asked Goodman how the writing experience she describes is similar to, or different from, either the switching from one personality to another personality in multiple personality, or the co-consciousness that some alternate personalities have with each other.

“Madness is easy. A character with good sense is a tour de force” (1).

The concept of madness is nonspecific and the word “madness” is lazy. It might refer, often inadvertently, to any of many different things, including schizophrenic psychosis, the mental disturbance of various medical and neurological conditions, a severe grief reaction, a manic episode, psychotic depression, psychopathic personality, various kinds of obsession, road rage, multiple personality, or creativity (as in Henry James’s phrase “the madness of art”) (search in this blog).

A classic example of the use of the word “madness” is a novel that Goodman mentions, Don Quixote, which she says has “the seeds of a hundred future masterpieces inside it” (1). This novel, as long as it is, never addresses, even in passing, what kind of madness Don Quixote has, which can be excused in a novel from four centuries ago, but not now.

Search “madness” and “Don Quixote” in this blog.

1. Allegra Goodman. Interviewed by The New York Times Book Review. July 13, 2017 (online). July 16, 2017 (print). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/books/review/allegra-goodman-by-the-book.html

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 8): Scarlett O’Hara does not have histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, or sociopathic personality disorders.

In various parts of the novel, Scarlett might seem histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, or sociopathic. But at the time of the novel discussed in the last post, she was none of these. And since a personality disorder, by definition, is always the same for a particular person and is always present, Scarlett does not have any of the above personality disorders.

Indeed, since Scarlett seems to have a different personality at different times in the novel, she might have multiple personality, which, as discussed below, is neither a psychosis nor a personality disorder.

Terminology: “multiple personality” is the most widely understood term for this condition. The name has remained popular, because the person may appear to have more than one personality, and, like Scarlett O’Hara, may behave rather differently at different times.

     However, the term “multiple personality” does have the disadvantage that the condition it refers to may be mistakenly thought of as a personality disorder. Multiple personality is not a personality disorder.

     A personality disorder, like those mentioned above, has its own, consistent, pattern of behavior. In contrast, a person with multiple personality has various, inconsistent, contradictory patterns of behavior, which correspond to the person’s alternate personalities.

     Since 1994, the official, American Psychiatric Association term for multiple personality has been “dissociative identity disorder”; it is classified as a dissociative disorder. The official name change from “multiple personality” to “dissociative identity” was for political and technical reasons. The condition itself was unchanged.

     By whatever name, multiple personality has never been a psychosis and has never had anything to do with schizophrenia, except by mistake. When psychoanalytic terms like “neurosis” had still been in use (prior to 1980), multiple personality had been classified as a neurosis.

     Unfortunately, multiple personality and schizophrenia are still often confused with each other and mistakenly lumped together in novels and literary criticism under the nonspecific, catch-all term, “madness.”